States Hire Bill-Collecting PartnerStates Hire Bill-Collecting Partner

In the past seven months, Arizona has collected $1.3 million in overdue court fines and fees, all of it more than two years past due. One man, dismayed that Arizona tracked him down even though he'd moved five times since being fined, actually called the state to ask how it found him.

The answer: Arizona hired Affiliated Computer Systems Inc., a services company better known as an IT integrator, to take over the collection of overdue fines. ACS found him through a third-party data source, which it can utilize more efficiently than the courts could case-by-case because of the volume of data it processes, says Mike DiMarco, Fines/Fees And Restitution Enforcement program manager for the Arizona Supreme Court's Administrative Office of Courts.

Arizona and ACS are part of what could be an increasingly common partnership. While states look to outsourcers to help them cut costs and improve efficiency, IT-services companies are increasingly looking for contracts that let them take over entire business processes as ongoing services deals rather than one-off integration projects.

Missouri has a similar deal with ACS. "There are some operations in which those of us in government can learn a lot from what private industry does," says Michael Buenger, Missouri State Court administrator. States "can use some of the methodologies and some of the services of private industry in helping run government more efficiently and more effectively."

In Arizona and Missouri, ACS keeps a share of the fines it collects. Missouri state law lets a collections company charge up to 20% on the debt owed.

The idea of getting an outsider to collect on overdue bills isn't new. But with ACS, it's part of a larger court-management project. In Missouri, ACS has real-time integration with the courts' case-management system. It also has access to state vehicle-registration information, and its systems communicate with the Department of Revenue for tax-related information. For "skip-tracing"--finding those who won't pay--the company has access to more than 50 external databases, in addition to its internal ones.

"We're really looking at this much differently than a traditional collections model," says Mike Daniels, senior VP of government systems at ACS. "We're looking at it as an end-to-end business-process outsourcing with technology-enabled benefits."

Missouri has been working with ACS since 1997, when it awarded the company a contract for a statewide case-management system, which is being rolled out in a series of phases. The pilot program expanded to include more than 53 courts beginning in early 2001, and all circuit, associate, and appellate courts should have the Judicial Information System in place this year, funding permitting.

Outsourcing the collections process began in April in Missouri. It's part of a growing effort by states to avoid the expense of building and operating technology-intensive systems by sharing in a revenue stream. Examples include BearingPoint and Microsoft getting paid per filing for an electronic court-filing system in Texas. ACS also provides business-process-outsourcing services for other court-related tasks, including data entry, imaging, phone, and Web-based constituent services.

Some people get nervous any time the government gets too good at tracking its citizens. DiMarco of the Arizona court system dismisses privacy concerns, saying the state doesn't divulge any private information and has a right to use the same tools as private industry to find scofflaws.

As Missouri's Buenger sees it, it's quite appropriate for governments to pursue such partnerships to collect what's owed. "When you get a ticket or when you get a court order, it's not like you're getting entry into an amusement park that you can walk away from," he says. "These are serious obligations."